It has only been about a year and a half since the first 1TB hard drives
began to hit the market -- Hitachi was the first to unveil its 1TB HDD in
January of 2007.

Just this week Hitachi unveiled its second generation 1TB HDD with a 43%
power savings compared to the first generation. The Hitachi drive uses three
platters to get the 1TB capacity and save energy. Today, Seagate announced the
world’s first 1.5TB desktop hard drive called the Barracuda
7200.11 1.5TB.

As you can gather by the name, the drive spins at 7,200 RPM and uses four
platters to reach the massive 1.5TB capacity. Seagate says that this is the
largest increase in storage capacity in the last 50-years and the 500GB
increase in capacity is thanks to improved perpendicular magnetic recording
technology.

Along with the 1.5TB 3.5-inch desktop HDD, Seagate also announced new 500GB
2.5-inch HDDs for use in notebooks. The 500GB notebook drives will ship in
5,400 and 7,200 rpm varieties. The drives are known as the Momentus 5400.6 and
Momentus 7200.4 HDDs. The 5,400 RPM drive uses an 8MB cache and the 7,200 drive
has a 16MB cache.

Seagate executive VP and general manager of Personal Computer Business
Michael Wingert said in a statement, “Organizations and consumers of all kinds
worldwide continue to create, share and consume digital content at levels never
before seen, giving rise to new markets, new applications and demand for
desktop and notebook computers with unprecedented storage capacity, performance
and reliability. Seagate is committed to powering the next generation of
computing today with the planet’s fastest, highest-capacity and most reliable
storage solutions.”